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Quotes from
The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-term Health
that I liked.

Each short quote is preceded by the words “Highlight” & indication of the location in the book.

Highlight(pink) – Page 4 · Location 180
Our gut is home to more than 100 trillion bacteria.

Highlight(pink) – Page 13 · Location 287
Gut bacteria live, and in fact thrive, on leftovers, primarily the complex plant polysaccharides known as dietary fiber. Whatever the bacteria don’t (or can’t) consume, for example seeds or the outer skin of corn kernels, is excreted some 24 to 72 hours after the initial esophageal descent.

Highlight(pink) – Page 16 · Location 324
The bacteria in the gut divide quickly, capable of doubling in number every thirty to forty minutes.

Highlight(pink) – Page 17 · Location 339
Those who have studied the Hadza estimate they consume between 100 to 150 grams of fiber per day. To put these numbers into context, Americans typically eat only 10 to 15 grams of fiber per day.

Highlight(pink) – Page 24 · Location 431
In mid-nineteenth-century London, people obtaining their water downstream of the Thames were almost four times more likely to get cholera than people drinking farther upstream.

Highlight(pink) – Page 56 · Location 860
Farmers have known for decades that giving low doses of antibiotics to livestock such as cattle, sheep, chickens, and pigs can increase their weight by up to 15 percent.

Highlight(pink) – Page 73 · Location 1078
The pathogenic E. coli from the undercooked hamburger you ate arrives in your digestive tract hoping for a quick and easy entrance into your intestinal wall. But as this pathogen attempts to penetrate your body’s internal surfaces, before it even tries to bushwhack its way through the mucus layer it must first contend with a gauntlet of resident microbes.

Highlight(pink) – Page 81 · Location 1187
Our personal approach to hand-washing is one example of how to be proactive about an emerging body of data, even in the absence of a definitive scientific study. We often do not have our children wash their hands before eating if they have just been playing in our yard, petting our dog, or gardening. However, after visiting a shopping center, hospital, petting zoo, or other area that is more likely to harbor pathogens from other humans or livestock, washing hands is mandatory. We also increase the frequency of washing during cold and flu season or if we have potentially come into contact with chemical residues (e.g., pesticides).

Highlight(pink) – Page 82 · Location 1201
People not inclined to owning a pet needn’t worry. Dirt is another way to increase your exposure to environmental microbes.

Highlight(pink) – Page 88 · Location 1258
You can think of that container of yogurt in the fridge as an external digestive tract, predigesting the lactose before it ever enters your mouth. This means that yogurt can be eaten by some who are lactose intolerant, but for those who can digest lactose, there is some forfeiture of calories to the bacteria.

Highlight(pink) – Page 93 · Location 1329
When studying the children at the Washington, DC, day care center, researchers found, somewhat unexpectedly, that not only did the probiotic-consuming children have lower rates of gastrointestinal infections, they also had fewer upper respiratory tract infections as well. Other trials encompassing thousands of people have also found fewer acute upper respiratory infections and less antibiotic use among probiotic consumers of all ages.

Highlight(pink) – Page 95 · Location 1353
In the West, other familiar fermented foods include sauerkraut (fermented cabbage), pickles (fermented cucumbers or other
vegetables), and more recently kombucha, a popular fermented, sweetened tea.

Highlight(pink) – Page 100 · Location 1426
Because companies can benefit from selling a probiotic without demonstrating its effectiveness, there is little incentive to explore new potential probiotics. Therefore, probiotic availability is primarily limited to just a few groups of traditional types—those that have been consumed in fermented foods for ages.

Highlight(pink) – Page 104 · Location 1477
Synbiotics are also becoming more widespread in stores, but we commonly make our own synbiotics by having a bowl of yogurt
(probiotic) with banana slices (inulin-containing prebiotic) on top. Or we top a salad containing onions (prebiotic) with a dressing made from sour cream or kefir (probiotic).

Highlight(pink) – Page 115 · Location 1622
Unlike beer and yogurt, ethanol and lactic acid are rare end products of the fermentation that takes place in the gut. The most commonly manufactured fermentation products in the gut are short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs).

Highlight(pink) – Page 115 · Location 1626
Oxygen is required to generate calories from SCFAs, and the gut is an oxygen-free environment. As we absorb SCFAs from our gut into our own oxygen-containing tissue, our bodies wring out the last remaining calories from the otherwise indigestible fiber.

Highlight(pink) – Page 130 · Location 1830
A kernel of wheat, or wheat berry, is made up of the endosperm, the bran, and the germ. The endosperm contains all the food, in the form of simple starches, to feed a newly growing wheat plant. The bran coats the outside of the wheat berry in a hard shell of fiber. The germ, a fat-filled reproductive organ that also contains fiber, germinates to create a new plant. Thousands of years ago people began using millstones to grind wheat berries into a meal, bringing about the birth of flour. However, this stone-ground wheat would be unrecognizable next to the factory-produced flour available today. …
But manufacturers struggled to keep flour fresh during the months it took to transport it from the mill to the consumer. To solve this problem, producers realized that if they removed the oily germ (the part that goes rancid) from wheat before milling, they could extend its shelf life almost indefinitely. What they didn’t know was that by removing the germ, they were also removing a large amount of the dietary fiber, not to mention all the other healthful micronutrients that are found in wheat germ. Millers then realized that by removing the bran as well, they could provide consumers with white, fluffy flour—composed entirely of endosperm—that many people considered better looking, more palatable, and easier to bake with.
…
Technology has provided us “rich man’s flour” inexpensively, but our microbiota’s diet has become poorer. As

Highlight(pink) – Page 132 · Location 1864
What about the Inuit? They eat almost no fiber and are very healthy.

Highlight(pink) – Page 189 · Location 2595
For the microbiota, the aging gut can be a place of dramatic environmental shifts. The speed at which food transits through the digestive tract lessens, which can lead to chronic constipation. Age-related decline in our sense of smell and taste and a decrease in our ability to chew can dramatically change our diet to one deficient in fibrous plants and chewy meat.

Highlight(pink) – Page 214 · Location 2903
A small garden can be a conduit to increased microbial interactions. If space for a garden is limited, explore creative ways to use the space that you have. Pots on a patio or even a window-box herb garden can encourage contact with natural microbial life that occurs in soil and on plants. With space being a premium in the San Francisco Bay Area, we have converted a portion of our front yard to raised-bed garden boxes.

http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/federal-guidelines-fiber-men-women-2284.html
QT:{{"
According to the Institute of Medicine, adequate intake levels for fiber are 38 grams per day for men ages 19 to 50 and 30 grams of fiber each day for men ages 50 and older.
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Loyal Engineers Steering…#Voyager Probes Across the Universe
https://www.NYTimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engineers-steering-nasas-voyager-probes-across-the-universe.html True dedication: they’ve spent whole careers on this

QT:{{”
“Their fluency in archaic programming languages will become only more crucial as the years go on, because even as the probes harvest priceless information from the cosmos, they are running out of fuel. (Decaying plutonium supplies their power.) By 2030 at the latest, they will not have enough juice left to run a single experiment. And even that best case comes with a major caveat: that the flight-team members forgo retirement to squeeze the most out of every last watt.

One of the greatest obstacles to planetary science has always been the human life span: Typically, for instance, a direct flight to Neptune would take about 30 years. But in the spring of 1965, Gary Flandro, a doctoral student at Caltech, noticed that all four outer planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — would align on the same side of the sun in the 1980s. If a spacecraft were launched in the mid- to late 1970s, it could use the gravity of the first body to slingshot to the second, and so on. Such a trajectory would add enough speed to shorten the total journey by almost two-thirds. What’s more, this orbital configuration would not appear again for 175 years.” “}}

#Climatechange linked to…allergies, #asthma
http://www.USAToday.com/story/news/nation/2013/05/30/climate-change-allergies-asthma/2163893/ Pollen up from a longer season; monitoring done w/o pay by volunteers

QT:{{”
“All of these things are likely affecting us,” says the CDC’s Akinbami, but it’s unclear which factors — chemicals, hygiene, pollen — have the most impact or what their relationship is to each other. She says the first two sensitize people and the third triggers their sensitivity.

On the pollen front alone, there are large gaps in the data, says the CDC’s Luber, noting pollen counts are not done on weekends and don’t cover every state. There’s not a single pollen-counting station in Alaska, Hawaii or 16 other U.S. states.

In fact, the 76 U.S. stations (plus one in Puerto Rico) are run by volunteers trained and certified by the National Allergy Bureau, part of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (AAAAI), a private organization that promotes research and treatment.

“There’s no federal funding,” says Linda Ford, an allergist who volunteers to do the count for the Omaha area as a way to help her patients. “There is no automated service for this,” she says, adding it can take as long as two or three hours.”
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The absent-minded prof in the news…!

http://www.nature.com/news/cybersecurity-for-the-travelling-scientist-1.22379

Cybersecurity for the travelling scientist

Virtual private networks, tracking apps and ‘burner’ laptops: how to protect sensitive data when you take your research on the road.

Brian Owens

02 August 2017

QT:{{”
Mark Gerstein has had his fair share of scares when it comes to losing track of his electronic devices — and, along with them, access to his private information and research data.

“I’m very security conscious, but also a bit of an absent-minded professor,” says Gerstein, a bioinformatician at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

He recalls one trip to Boston, Massachusetts, when he left his phone in a taxi, and watched it get farther and farther away on the tracking app on his iPad while he ran after the car in vain. Luckily, Gerstein was able to contact the taxi company, and eventually watched his phone make the return journey to his pocket.

Gerstein’s story had a happy ending, but all too often, hardware lost on the road is lost for good.
“}}

How far are you from…spots to watch the #Eclipse?
https://www.buzzfeed.com/zahrahirji/spectacular-views-of-the-eclipse Does anyone know what we’ll see in CT on 8/21? A partial one?

QT:{{”
“The zone of totality is about 70 miles wide and stretches diagonally across the middle of the country from Oregon to South Carolina. Hundreds of towns and cities in 12 states fall fully within the zone. And the closer you are to the zone’s center, the longer the full eclipse will last. While the maximum possible duration of the full eclipse is about 2 minutes and 40 seconds, the partial eclipse will last upward of two hours in most places nationwide.”
“}}

QT:{{”
The conventional thinking, held by the large proportion of the many researchers and clinicians I’ve interviewed over the years, is that obesity is caused by caloric excess. They refer to it as an “energy balance” disorder, and so the treatment is to consume less energy (fewer calories) and expend more. When we fail to maintain this prescription, the implication is that we simply lack will power or self-discipline.

“It’s viewed as a psychological issue or even a question of
character,” says Dr. David Ludwig, who studies and treats obesity at Harvard Medical School.

The minority position in this field — one that Dr. Ludwig holds, as do I after years of reporting — is that obesity is actually a hormonal regulatory disorder, and the hormone that dominates this process is insulin. It directly links what we eat to the accumulation of excess fat and that, in turn, is tied to the foods we crave and the hunger we experience. It’s been known since the 1960s that insulin signals fat cells to accumulate fat, while telling the other cells in our body to burn carbohydrates for fuel. By this thinking these carbohydrates are uniquely fattening.

“}}

Are You a Carboholic? Why Cutting #Carbs Is So Tough
https://www.NYTimes.com/2017/07/19/well/eat/are-you-a-carboholic-why-cutting-carbs-is-so-tough.html #Obesity as an energy-balance v hormonal-regulatory disorder

The Big Book http://www.Esquire.com/features/robert-caro-0512 Great description of a clinical & cool but productive 4-decade relationship betw. R #Caro & his editor

LBJ #4

QT:{{”
“Gottlieb did the same math and agreed. In an industry that survives mostly by lying to itself, he is an anti-romantic, an
unsentimentalist. When he edits Caro, they sit side by side at a conference table and go through the pile in front of them, page by tattered page, Gottlieb attacking anything that reads too much like writing, too much like nostalgia or indulgence. He and Caro have mellowed with age, but they have fought bitter fights, fights that have caused people to close their office doors hundreds of feet away. “Everything to him is as serious as everything else,” Gottlieb says. “When we came to something like a semicolon, it was war.”

…Gottlieb is the taskmaster. (“I can remember when he told me, ‘Not bad,’ ” Caro says. “Once.”) Gottlieb and Caro, bound for forty years, rarely see each other socially. Theirs is a professional relationship, clear-eyed and clinical.

Yet they are also prisoners of a mutual faith. “Bob is convinced that without me, he cannot function,” Gottlieb says. “I have explained to him for years that it isn’t the truth. It isn’t the truth. But because he believes it to be true, it is true.” And Gottlieb has given over so much of his own life to Caro, has fought so hard over semicolons, because he believes something else to be true. “These books will live forever,” Gottlieb says. “We all know that.””
“}}

The Big Book http://www.Esquire.com/features/robert-caro-0512 Great description of a clinical & cool but productive 4-decade relationship betw. R #Caro & his editor

LBJ #4

QT:{{”
“Gottlieb did the same math and agreed. In an industry that survives mostly by lying to itself, he is an anti-romantic, an
unsentimentalist. When he edits Caro, they sit side by side at a conference table and go through the pile in front of them, page by tattered page, Gottlieb attacking anything that reads too much like writing, too much like nostalgia or indulgence. He and Caro have mellowed with age, but they have fought bitter fights, fights that have caused people to close their office doors hundreds of feet away. “Everything to him is as serious as everything else,” Gottlieb says. “When we came to something like a semicolon, it was war.”

…Gottlieb is the taskmaster. (“I can remember when he told me, ‘Not bad,’ ” Caro says. “Once.”) Gottlieb and Caro, bound for forty years, rarely see each other socially. Theirs is a professional relationship, clear-eyed and clinical.

Yet they are also prisoners of a mutual faith. “Bob is convinced that without me, he cannot function,” Gottlieb says. “I have explained to him for years that it isn’t the truth. It isn’t the truth. But because he believes it to be true, it is true.” And Gottlieb has given over so much of his own life to Caro, has fought so hard over semicolons, because he believes something else to be true. “These books will live forever,” Gottlieb says. “We all know that.””
“}}

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanobrevibacter_smithii

QT:{{"
Methanobrevibacter smithii is the predominant archaeon in the human gut. It plays an important role in the efficient digestionof polysaccharides (complex sugars) by consuming the end products of bacterial fermentation. Methanobrevibacter smithii is a single-celled microorganism from the Archaea domain. M. smithii is a methanogen, and a hydrogenotroph that recycles the hydrogen by combining it with carbon dioxide to methane. The removal of hydrogen by M. smithii is thought to allow an increase in the extraction of energy from nutrients by shifting bacterial fermentation to more oxidized end products.[1]
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